In The Flap of Wings, On My Tongue; Tenderness
for J
this is not a poem where Paul Simon dances in a bar,
gets high and everyone foxtrots to his lead guitar
it is not about a radio from his childhood vying against
the high laughter of his mother from another room
or the ballad he wrote of a sky singing itself to sleep//
I promise you this poem won’t have any laughter, any marijuana,
any radios, or anybody singing themselves into silence
//maybe this poem will be about names or the lack thereof
maybe this poem will be about fingers fishing colour from
a bed of flowers//maybe this poem will be about names//
sometimes, you go by Jay, but when your name is unfurled
to its fullness, it means i hold the lord dear
like a song keeping tenderness alive//the way an orchestra
holds a sonata till it trickles to a coda and nothing is left
but a cello praying for the miracle of fingers to make of it
one last sostenuto; to make of it the shadow of a melody that was
//did you know there is a drug called Sonata and its side effects
include lack of coordination and memory loss, and this forces me
to stand in all bareness, like Adam on Creation morning, before
the truth that melody is just another name for loss and a supplication
for tenderness is a body trying in vain to pray its
river-ness into viscosity// do I pile twelve stones, get me a lamb
without blemish or two doves white before I can press my mouth
to your ears to tell you of roses, chrysanthemums, aloe vera dying
in its pot on a windowsill and innocence groveling before despots
//Jay, did you know there are birds called jays—when they are not
flitting from bough to bough or adding grazioso to woodland
symphony, they rip nuts from branches and each bird may
hoard 3,000 to 5,000 acorns for winter// though they try, they do not
remember to dig them all up and the ones left in the earth become oaks
become forests//bird scientists say they forget but I do not believe
I do not think this is a failure of the hippocampus// i think it is just
the birds striving to cover the nakedness of earth// Adam ate of
the fruit and knew his own nudity//maybe every bite of tenderness
is a body stilling itself from dancing to the rhythm of its own bareness
//did you know jays have blue markings on their wings and the world
knows them as just that—markings//but i never stop wondering
how a bird carries scintillas of the sky on its own body//
how does tenderness hold fragments of God so well in itself without
the breakage known to bodies holding the divine; without crashing
to earth in a flurry of feathers//in a church I used to attend,
there was a scene of the Last Supper in stained glass
high up where everyone could see; the Lord giving of his own body,
The Twelve holding fragments of him to their lips without combusting,
and light washing them through//one Sunday, we met them on the floor
—Christ, his Apostles and their unleavened loaves—in smithereens//
cops ruled out iconoclasm and as the priest said Mass,
unfiltered sunlight streamed onto the organ and the tenderness of the
pipes streamed into our bodies//in the churchyard, some guy
with squeaky clean shoes would later step out from his Mercedes
and call it thermal expansion and I think that is a fancy way of saying
tenderness cannot hold the divine without breaking, without bowing
beneath the weight of its beauty//yet and yet still, a little bird holds
God on its own plumage; and the calling of a name wraps the Lord
around the tongue and nothing happens, nothing but sacredness
reveling in garbs of tenderness//nothing but something without a name.
Onyekachi Iloh is a writer, poet and visual artist exploring photography as a means of documentation, and the re-examination of sight. A winner of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Welter, Singapore Unbound, Blue Marble Review, Palette Poetry and elsewhere.